The pre-Pandaria patch has really shaken things up, though more for some classes than for others. It’s too early to know how things will really shape up, but it’s awfully confusing to be playing a warrior or a bear druid these days. On the other hand, that’s what paladins go through every two years. Rogues, though? The most change rogues see from expansion to expansion is: “Hey, some of the stuff I used to have to carry around in my bag has gone gray. Oh well, off to the vendor, then I can get back to stabbing things.”

Like the old saw about generals always preparing to fight the last war over again, it’s interesting to see how the endgame keeps evolving in response to the failings of the previous expansion. In Vanilla, just getting a raid together with everyone in the right resistance gear and with the right quest chains done was a major hurdle. Burning Crusade made things more accessible, but encumbered with complex attunement chains. Wrath embraced the idea of accessibility to such an extent that people got burned out on running the same raids over and over at different levels of difficulty, and also simplified dungeons to the point of pull group, mash aoe button, pull next group, repeat. Cataclysm significantly stepped up the challenge of endgame dungeons and raids, but gave us nothing else to do with our max-level characters. It’s too early to know what the Pandaria endgame is going to be like, but it’s a comfort to know that those of us who choose to opt out will still have plenty of other things to do with our gaming time.

August 17, 2012

Ah, Deepholme. What is there to say about Deepholme? I don’t personally like it, but it was an interesting experiment. It is impressive to see all the art and design work that went into the zone. Blizzard really rose to the creative challenge of imagining the elemental planes as places that our characters could visit and play around in. So when I say that I don’t like Deepholme, I’m not saying it’s a bad or badly designed zone, just that it doesn’t work for me. When leveling my alts, I avoid Deepholme as much as possible because I find the environment oppressive and not fun to be in.

On the other hand, who would have guessed there could be so many bad puns about rocks?

Sadly, there’s no way to properly show in a comic the poetry-reading voice– slow, emphatic, monotonal, slightly nasal– that I learned from too much time hanging around with Very Deep and Serious Poets in college. You’ll just have to imagine it for yourselves.